A viral video showing the Emir of Qatar Sheikh Tamim Al Thani insulting the United States President Donald Trump, and calling him a robber, is an AI-manipulated deepfake.
BOOM found the the video has been taken from an interview of Al Thani in 2017 by US media outlet CBS News, where he speaks on a diplomatic crisis in the Middle East, following a blockade imposed by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt. Furthermore, manual analysis and AI detection tools confirmed to us that the video has been overlaid with an AI-generated voice clone.
The video has been shared widely by multiple users, where Al Thani can be heard saying, "I truly regret inviting Trump, the robber, to the Middle East." He then appears to say, "He came to collect tributes, fountains, palaces, golden welcoming ceremonies, light shows, private flights. In his eyes, these grand gestures are not courtesies but spoils of war."
One of the captions shared on Instagram read, "Another victim #fafo Info 👇 😵😵😵 REGRET OF THE #Trump INVITATION to #saudi #qatar #Repost @libradapaz The #republican party is the National party. #corruption at its finest. Donald Trump and his entire circus of #racist #fascism clowns. Find 1 republican in this administration that's NOT #corrupt - Can't do it, can you⁉️"
Click here, here and here to view archives of posts carrying the viral video.
BOOM also received the video on its WhatsApp tipline number (+917700906588) for verification.
Fact Check
BOOM did a reverse image search with a few keyframes from the viral video, which led us to an interview given by Al Thani to US media outlet CBS News in 2017. We found that Al Thani's clothing and the background from this interview is an exact match with the viral video.
In the video, Al Thani speaks about a diplomatic crisis in the Middle East, following a blockade imposed by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt. Looking through the video, we could not find Al Thani making any of the comments about Trump that appears in the viral video.
Analysing the video closely, we found that Al Thani's voice appears inconsistent with the lip movement, with some visible distortions around the mouth. Taking cue from this, we ran the video through Hive Moderator's video detection tool, which gave a very high likelihood of the audio being AI-generated.
We further consulted with our partners at the Deepfakes Analysis Unit (DAU), who also ran the audio track through the deepfake detection tool Deepfake-O-Meter, by University at Buffalo's Media Forensics Lab.
Four out of seven audio classifiers on Deepfake-O-Meter found high likelihood of the audio track being AI-generated.
